Hi! My name is Gavin Li, a final year psychology student at University of Southampton. I am currently working on positive illusions and self-expansion under the Psychology WikiProject. Together with other coursemates, we are aiming to improve the online psychology articles of Self and Identity Task Force under the supervision of our lecturer Aiden Gregg.

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I couldn't do the proper referercing down in my wiki usagepage becuase I have been working on 2 articles (improving the 'positive illusions' article and creating the 'self-expansion' article).

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What is Positive Illusion?

People often hold beliefs about themselves, the world, and the future which are more positive than reality can sustain. These beliefs, as first termed by Taylor and Brown (1988), are called positive illusions.

Three types of positive illusions have been documented: self-aggrandizing self-perceptions, perceptions of mastery illusion of control and unrealistic optimism.

The first illusion is also known as the above-average effect, where people consistently regard themselves more positively than they regard others and less negatively than others regard them. It might be due to the desire to see oneself more favourable relative to one’s peers (Lewinsohn et al., 1980). One of its characteristics is that positive personality information is efficiently processed and better recalled in comparison to negative ones (Kuiper & Derry, 1982). Moreover, positive attributes are judged to be more descriptive of themselves than of an average person, whereas negative ones are judged to be less descriptive of themselves than of average person (Alicke, 1985). Another source of evidence showed that people would even overvalue the letter in their own name, relative to letters that do not appear in their names (Nutten, 1987). This effect has been widely recognized across traits (Brown, 1986) and abilities (Campbell, 1986), including realm of driving ability (Svenson, 1981), parenting (Wenger & Fowers, 2008), leadership ability, teaching ability, ethics and health. More specifically, the effect would increase when people face up to a threat to an important aspect of their identities.

The second illusion refers to people’s belief that they can exert more personal control over environmental circumstances than is actually the case, for instance, their perceived influence on random systems such as the roll of dice or flip of coin (Fleming & Darley, 1989).

The last type - optimism bias - corresponds to peoples’ unrealistic thinking that the present is better than the past, and the future will be better than the present. In other words, people would overestimate the likelihood that they will experience a wide variety of pleasant events, such as enjoying their first job or having a gifted child, and somewhat underestimate their risk of succumbing to negative events, such as getting divorced or falling victim to a chronic disease. This illusory nature of optimism is also evident in peoples’ under-estimation of the time taken for a variety of tasks (Buelher et al., 1994), or having compared any judgments of the self with judgments of others.

What are some common examples of positive illusions in everyday life? If you make a list of the things you want to accomplish in a day, but find that you have completed far fewer than you had expected by the end of the day, you are probably showing unrealistic optimism, a positive illusion about your productivity. If you bet on an otherwise unfancied sports team because you have a hunch that they will pull off an upset, you are almost certainly showing a positive illusion. You may of course be right some of the time, but looked at from the standpoint of its objective likelihood, your belief could correctly be considered illusory.

Mental health

Taylor and Brown’s Social Psychological Model on mental health has assumed that positive beliefs would be tied to psychological wellbeing, and that positive illusions, even unrealistic, would promote good mental health. The reference to wellbeing here means the abilities to feel good about oneself, to be creative and/or productive in one’s work, to form satisfying relationships with other people and to effectively combat stress when necessary (Taylor & Brown, 1988). Positive illusions are particularly useful for helping people to get through major stressful events or traumas, such as life-threatening illnesses or serious accidents. People who are able to develop or maintain their positive beliefs in the face of these potential setbacks tend to cope more successfully with them, and show less psychological distress than those less able. For example, psychological researches showed that cancer survivours often report a higher quality of life than people who have never had cancer at all (Taylor, 1983). This could be physiologically protective because they have been able to use the traumatic experience to evoke an increased sense of meaning and purpose (Taylor et al, 2000).

People also hold positive illusions because such beliefs often enhance their productivity and persistence with tasks on which they might otherwise give up (Greenwald, 1980). When people believe they can achieve a difficult goal, this expectation often creates a sense of energy and excitement, the fuel needed to persist in order to bring goals to realization. Even though people sometimes fall short of achieving all they set out to do, a positive illusion may help them to make more progress than would otherwise have been the case. Imagine, for example, of a day in which you made a long list of things to do. At the end of the day, there were probably things still left undone, but you almost certainly got through more than you would have done with a more realistic list, comprising maybe three or four things, or without a list at all.

Positive illusions are therefore adaptive because they enable people to feel hopeful in the face of uncontrollable risks (Janoff-Bulman & Brickman, 1982). This process may help to keep people from becoming immobilized or depressed by seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Physical health

Apart from having better psychological adjustment with more active coping (Taylor et al., 1992), the ability to develop and sustain positive beliefs in the face of setbacks has its health benefits. Research with men who were HIV seropositive, or already diagnosed with AIDS has shown that those who hold unrealistically positive assessments of their abilities to control their health conditions take longer to develop symptoms, experience a slower course of illness, as well as other positive cognitive outcomes, such as acceptance of the loss (Bower et al.,1998). The association between optimism and physical health is evident in the finding of another study that men with AIDS and were found to be HIV positive did not show any symptoms for 6 years (Reed et al., 1999).

Potential liabilities

However, falsely positive self-perceptions are not always adaptive. There are several potential risks that may arise if people hold positive illusions about their personal qualities and likely outcomes. First of all, they might set themselves up for unpleasant surprises for which they are ill-prepared when their overly optimistic beliefs are disconfirmed. Making things worse, they might have to tackle the consequences thereafter. However, research suggests that, for the most part, these adverse outcomes do not occur. People’s beliefs are more realistic at times when realism serves them particularly well: for example, when initially making plans; when accountability is likely or following negative feedback from the environment. Following a setback or failure, all is still not lost, as people’s overly positive beliefs may be used again in a new undertaking (Armor & Taylor, 1998).

A second risk is that people who hold positive illusions will set goals, or undertake courses of actions which are more likely to produce failure than success. This concern appears to be largely without basis. Research shows that when people are deliberating future courses of actions for themselves, such as whether to take a particular job or go to graduate school, their perceptions are fairly realistic, but they can become overly optimistic when they turn to implementing their plans. Although there is no guarantee that one’s realistic prediction would turn out to be accurate (Armor & Taylor, 1998), the shift from realism to optimism may provide the fuel needed to bring potentially difficult tasks from conception to fruition (Taylor & Gollwitzer, 1995).

A third risk is that positive self-perceptions may have social costs. A specific source of evidence of the self-serving pattern in ability assessment examined the use of idiosyncratic definitions of traits and abilities (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989). The authors suggested that the social costs occur when one’s definition of ability is perceived to be the only one relevant to achievement outcomes. In other words, wherever people fail to recognise when other plausible definitions of ability are relevant for success, estimate of their future well-being will be overstated.

Last but not least, people who are self-promoting in public situations, in all likelihood, would turn other people off. Initially, their upbeat optimistic nature may endear them to others, but over time, other people can become aware of this self-absorption, and consequently turn away from them. On the contrary, people who hold overly positive self-assessments privately do not necessarily turn others off, and indeed, the opposite can be true. They can make positive impressions on others, be well liked by their friends, and strike clinicians and peers as mentally healthy. One might say that it is all right to think you are better than others, as long as you do not obviously act that way.

Origins

Where do positive illusions come from? Positive illusions have been commonly understood as one of the apparent effects of self-enhancement, a desire to maximise the positivity of one’s self-views (e.g. Leary, 2007) and a function of boosting self-esteem. These kinds of self-serving attributions seemed to be displayed by positive self-viewers only. In fact, the negative-viewers were found to display the opposite pattern (e.g. Swann, Predmore, Griffin, & Gaines, 1987). Research suggests that there may be modest genetic contributions to the ability to develop positive illusions (Owens et al., 2007). Early environment also plays an important role: people are more able to develop these positive beliefs in nurturing environments than in harsh ones. Gene-environment interactions may also play a role.

Alternative explanations involved the dimensions like the easiness and commonness of the tasks. For example, people regard themselves to be above average on easy tasks such as riding a bicycle but below average on difficult tasks like riding a unicycle (Kruger, 1999, as cited in Sedikides and Gregg, 2008). The latter effect has been recently named the " Worse-than-average effect" (Moore, 2007). In addition, tasks that shifted attentions from the self to the comparative target would stop people overly optimise (Eiser, Pahl, & Prins, 2001).

Can positive illusions be learned? There is no reason to think that positive illusions cannot be taught, and indeed, many well-established therapies involving teaching people to think better of themselves, their circumstances, and their outcomes may rely, at least in part, on instilling a somewhat illusory positive glow about oneself in the world.

The cultural prevalence also has a significant role in positive illusions. Although it is easy to document positive illusions in Western cultures, people in East Asian cultures are much less likely to self-enhance and indeed, are often self-effacing instead (Heine & Hamamura, 2007). Positive illusions may nonetheless be manifested in group-enhancing biases, and may also be privately held, rather than publicly voiced, in East Asian cultures.

Reducing positive illusions

Two hypotheses have been stated in the Literature with regard to avoiding the drawbacks of positive illusions: firstly by minimizing the illusions in order to take the full advantage of the benefits (Baumeister, 1989b), and secondly through making important decisions (Gollwitzer & Kinney, 1989).

Otherwise, the nature of depression seems to have its role in diminishing positive illusions. For example, individuals who are low in self-esteem, slightly depressed, or both are more balanced in self-perceptions (Coyne & Gotlib, 1983). Likewise, these mildly depressed individuals are found to be less vulnerable to exaggerate control over events (Golin et al., 1979) and to assess future circumstances in biased fashion (Ruehlman, West, & Pasahow, 1985).

Research contributors to this field include David Armor, Jonathon Brown, Julienne Bower, Geoffrey Reed, Suzanne Segerstrom, Shelley Taylor and Vickie Helgesen.

See also

• Mental health
• Positive psychology
• Psychological resilience
• Quality of life
• Depressive realism

External links

• Time Magazine 2005 cover story on Positive Psychology

• “ You are what you expect” New York Times article by Jim Holt

References

• Alicke, M.D. (1985). Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 1621-1630.

• Alicke, M.D., & Govorun, O. (2005). “The better-than-average effect.” In M.D. Alicke, D.A. Dunning, & J.I. Krueger (Eds.), The self in social judgment (pp. 85 -108). Hove: Psychology.

• Armor, D.A. et al. (2002). "When predictions fail: The dilemma of unrealistic optimism." In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.) Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (pp. 334-347). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

• Baumeister, R.F. (1989b). The optimal margin of illusion. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 8, 176-189.

• Bower, J.E., et al. (1998). Cognitive processing, discovery of meaning, CD 4 decline, and AIDS-related mortality among bereaved HIV-seropositive men. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66, 979-986.

• Brown, J.D. (1986). Evaluations of self and others: Self-enhencement biases in social judgements. Social Cognition, 4, 353-376.

• Campbell, J.D. (1986). Similarity and uniqueness: The effects of attribute type, relevance, and individual differences in self-esteem and depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 281-294.

• Coyne, J.C., & Gotlib, I. H. (1983). The role of cognition in depression: A critical appraisal. Psychological Bulletin, 94, 472-505.

• Dunning, D., Meyerowitz, J.A., & Holzberg, A.D. (1989). "Ambiguity and self-evaluation: The role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability." In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.) Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (pp. 324-333). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

• Eiser, J.R., Pahl, S.,& Prins, Y.R.A. (2001). Optimism, pessimism, and the direction of self-other comparisons. Journal of experimental Social Psychology, 37, 77-84.

• Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (in press). Social cognition (3rd ed.). New York: Random House.

• Flming, J., & Darley, J.M. (1989). Perceiving choice and constraint: The effects of contextual and behavioural cues on attitude attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 27-40.

• Golin, S., Terrell, T., Weitz,J., & Drost, P.L. (1979). The illusion of control among depressed patients. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88, 454-457.

• Gollwitzer, P. M. & Kinney, R. F. (1989). Effects of deliberative and implemental mind-sets on illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 531-542.

• Greenwald, A. G. (1980). The totalitarian ego: Fabrication and revision of personal history. American Psychologist, 35, 603-618.

• Heine, S.J., & Hamamura, T. (2007). In Search of East Asian Self-Enhancement. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11, 4-27.

• Janoff-Bulman, R., & Brickman, P. (1982). Expectations and what people learn from failure. In N.T Feather (Ed.), Expectations and action: Expectancy-value models in psychology (pp. 207-272). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

• Kruger, J. (1999). Lake Wobegon be gone! The below-average effect and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgements. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 221-232.

• Kuiper, N. A., & Derry, P.A. (1982). Depressed and nondepressed content self-reference in mild depression. Journal of Personality, 50, 67-79.

• Leary, M.R. (2007). Motivational and emotional aspects of the self. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 317-344.

• Lewinsohn, P.M., Mischel, W., Chaplin, W., & Barton, R. (1980). Social competence and depression: The role of illusory self-perceptions. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 89, 203-212.

• Moore, D.A. (2007). Not so above average after all: When people believe they are worse than average and its implications for theories of bias in social comparison. Organisational Bahaviour and Human Decision Processes, 102, 42-58.

• Nuttin, J. M., Jr. (1987). Affective consequences of mere ownership: The name letter effect in twelve European languages. European Journal of Social Psychology, 17, 381-402.

• Owens, J.S., Goldfine, M.E., Evangelista, N.M., Hoza, B., & Kaiser, N.M. (2007). A critical review of self-perception and the positive illusory bias I children with ADHD. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 10, 335-351.

• Reed, G.M. et al. (1999). Negative HIV-specific expectancies and AIDS-related bereavement as predictors of symptom onset in asymptomatic HIV-positive gay men. Health Psychology, 18, 354-363.

• Ruehlman, L.S., West, S. G., & Kohn, M. (1985). Depression and evaluative schemata. Journal of Personality, 53, 46-92.

• Sedikides, C., & Gregg, A.P. (2008). Self-enhancement: Food for thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 102-116.

• Segerstrom, S.C. et al. (1998). Optimism is associated with mood, coping, and immune change in response to stress. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1646-1655.

• Svenson, O. (1981). Are we less risky and more skilful than our fellow drivers? Acta Psychologica, 47, 143-151.

• Swann, W.B., Predmore, S.C., Griffin, J.J., & Gaines, B. (1987). The cognitive-affective crossfire: When self-consistency confronts self-enhancement. American Psychology Association, 52, 81-89.

• Taylor, S. E. (1983). Adjustment to threatening events: A theory of cognitive adaptation. American Psychologist, 38, 1161-1173.

• Taylor, S.E., & Brown, J. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193-210.

• Taylor, S. E., Kemeny, M. E., Aspinwall, L. G., Schneider, S. G., Rodriguez, R., & Herbert, M. (1992). Optimism, coping, psychological distress, and high-risk sexual behavior among men at risk for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 460–473.

• Taylor, S.E., Kemeny, M.E.,Reed, G.M.,Bower, J.E., & Gruenewald, T.L. (2000). Psychological resources, positive illusions, and health. American Psychologist, 55, 99-109.

• Wenger, A., & Fowers, B.J. (2008). Positive Illusions in Parenting: Every Child Is Above Average. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, 611–634.

What is Self-expansion?

The desire of expanding the self is a central human motivation which serves to increase one’s potential efficacy to achieve goals by acquiring social and material resources, perspectives, and identities (Aron et al., 1991). Another usage relates to the expansion of the self-concepts and people’s potential to act effectively by incorporating new self-related beliefs of themselves (Gardner et al., 2002).

Cognitive mechanism in close relationship

Much of the researches on self-expansion have focused on the impact of close relationship on cognitive contents of self.

It has been proposed that people store information about relationship partners in the form of relational schemas (Baldwin, 1992). These include “an interpersonal script for the interaction pattern, a self-schema of how self is experienced in that interpersonal situation, and a schema for the other person in the interaction” (Baldwin, 1992, p. 461). In other words, cues that bring a particular partner to mind would automatically activate the mental representations of self and the other as well as the corresponding aspects of self-knowledge within the schema (Ogilvie & Ashmore, 1991). Self-expansion is therfore beneficial by fitting in new features of resources, perspectives, characteristics of close others into their own self-concept.

Some experiments have demonstrated that cognition representations of the self and close others can be linked (Aron et al., 1991). This connectionist network also explains that representations of self and close others have many stronger links, whereas representations of more distant others are fewer and weaker (Smith, Coats, & Walling, 1999). In fact, even outsiders would link mental representations of two persons who have close relationship with each other (Sedikides, Olsen & Reis, 1993).

Role played in Attraction theories

Other studies show that this self-related motive also played a role in human attraction. For example, “Falling in love” would make changes in the content and the organization of self-concept, as well as an increase in self-esteem and self-efficacy (Aron, Paris, & Aron, 1995).

Another implication of the motivational aspect of the model has generated many studies that suggested the affectively positive nature of self-expanding behaviours (e.g. Aron et al., 2000). Couples who performed novel, arousing self-expanding activities have more satisfying relationship as they feel more connected to with their partners (Aron et al., 2000). That is, apart from the desire to be expanded to achieve higher potential efficacy, there is a key motivation in experiencing the expanding process. Despite this, the positive emotions associated with the fast self-expansion early in the relationship would diminish over time (Leary, 2007), which might somewhat link to the gradual decline in long-term relationship satisfaction.

Furthermore, quite ironically speaking, self-expansion seems to provide motivation for entering new relationships (Aron & Aron, 1997). Findings of the two longitudinal studies done by Aron, Paris and Aron (1995) suggested that entering into a new relationship increase the diversity of spontaneous self-concept and perceived self-efficacy.

Include others in the self

The model of self-expansion is based on the notion to “include others in the self”, an idea posited by Aron and Aron (1986) that involves the extent to which one’s self overlaps with the partner’s self, and in so doing, people’s sense of self can become broadened to include others. It has been argued that this process of “inclusion of other in the self” has to be regarded as complementary but distinctive from that of self-expansion. To be more precise, the chance to expand the self by including another in the self acts as the major motivation for forming a relationship, whereas the experience of rapid self-expansion provide the major motivation to maintain and deepen that particular relationship (Lewandowski, Aron, Bassis, & Kunak, 2006).

One of its implications is that people enter and maintain relationship (Aron & Aron, 1986) because one can expand the self and gain access to more resources and perspectives by including the partner in the self. In this context, one might imply that greater attractiveness would be found between those with different interests, or greater perceived dissimilarity, than one’s own, especially in the early stages of relationship development. It was supported by Amodio and Showers’ prediction (2005) that lower similarity allows maximum self-expansion. The effect is particularly evident under conditions in which a relationship is perceived to be likely, but not in the opposite ambiguous conditions (Aron, Steele & Kashdan, 2002).

Other implications

Another method of self-expansion is by identifying with groups (Smith & Henry, 1996). Studies have shown that people who identify highly with their in-groups display more stronger interconnection within their mental representation of oneself and in-group. This provides evidence to people’s self-concept being expanded in order to include the group.

References

• Aron, A. (2003). "The self and close relationship." In M.R. Leary, & J.P. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self and identity (pp. 442-461). New York: Guilford.

• Aron, A., & Aron, E. (1986). Love as the expansion of self: Understanding attraction and satisfaction. New York: Hemisphere.

• Aron A., & Aron, E. N. (1997). Self-expansion motivation and including other in the self. In S. Duck (Ed.), Knowledge handbook of personal relationships: Theory, research and interventions (2nd ed., pp. 251-270). New York: Wiley.

• Aron, A., Aron E.N., Tudor, M., & Nelson, G. (1991). Close relationships as including other in the self.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 241 – 253.

• Aron, A., Normon, C.C., Aron, E.N., MscKenna, C., & Heyman, R.E. (2000). Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 273-284.

• Aron, A., Paris, M., & Aron, E.N. (1995). Falling in love: Prospective studies of self-concept change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 1102 – 1112.

• Aron, A., Steele, J., & Kashdan, T. (2002). Attraction to others with similar interests as moderated by perceived opportunity for a relationship. Manuscript in preparation.

• Baldwin, M.W. (1992). Relational schemas and the processing of social information. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 461-484.

• Carmichael, C.L., Tsai, F.F., Smith, S.M, Caprariello, P.A., & Reis, H.T. (2007). "The self and intimate relationship." In C. Sedikides, & S.J. Spencer (Eds.), The Self(pp. 285-309). New York: Psychology Press.

• Gardner, W.L., Gabriel, S., & Hochschild, L. (2002). When you and I are “we”, you are not threatening: the role of self-expansion in social comparison. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 239–51

• Leary, M.R. (2007). Motivational and emotional aspects of the self. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 317–44

• Lewandowski, G.W., Aron, A., Bassis, S., & Kunak, J. (2006). Losing a self-expanding relationship: Implications for the self-concept. Personal relationship, 13, 317-331.

• Ogilvie, D.M., & Ashmore, R. D. (1991). Self-with-other representation as a unit of analysis in self-concept research. In R.C. Curtis (Ed.), The relational self: Theoretical convergences in psychoanalysis and social psychology (pp. 282-314). New York: Gilford.

• Sedikides, C., Olsen, N., & Reis, H.T. (1993). Relationships as natural categories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 71-82.

• Smith, E.R., Coats, S., & Walling, D. (1999). Overlapping mental representations of self, in-group, and partner: Further responses time evidence and a connectionist model. Journal of Personality and Social Bulletin, 25, 873-882.

• Smith, E.R., Henry, S. (1996). An in-group becomes part of the self: response time evidence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 635–42.

• Wright, S.C., Aron, A., & Tropp, L.R. (2002). “Including others (and groups) in the self: self-expansion and intergroup relations”. In J.P. Forgas, K.D.Williams (Eds.), The Social Self: Cognitive, Interpersonal, and Intergroup Perspectives (pp. 350). New York: Psychology Press.